In Palestine and beyond, carcerality cannot be understood as merely the physical complex of the prison. Rather, it operates as a "carceral continuum"; a dispersed and shifting regime of control that extends across checkpoints, borders, administrative systems, surveillance infrastructures and the fragmentation of land and social lives. This session approaches carcerality as a foundational logic of settler colonial governance, where imprisonment is not exceptional but constitutive of the political order. From military courts and administrative detention to permit regimes, spatial restrictions, and the policing of everyday movement, carcerality structures the conditions under which Palestinian life is organized, monitored, and constrained.
In this context, law does not stand outside violence as a neutral arbiter but operates as one of its primary instruments. Legal frameworks simultaneously claim to offer protection while enabling dispossession, repression, and erasure. Military orders, emergency regulations, counter-terrorism laws, and bureaucratic procedures work together to criminalize dissent, fragment collective political life, and recast resistance as a security threat.
At the same time, Palestinian prisoners and communities have long developed forms of resistance that unsettle and exceed the carceral order. Hunger strikes, collective organizing, smuggling of knowledge, cultural production, and everyday acts of refusal reassert the political nature of imprisonment and refuse its depoliticization. These practices reveal that carcerality is never total; it is continually contested, negotiated, and disrupted.
Bringing this analysis into dialogue with contemporary contexts such as Belgium, and Antwerp in particular, the session traces how carceral logics travel and reappear across different sites. The right to protest may be formally protected, yet its exercise is increasingly mediated by permit regimes, police discretion, surveillance, administrative sanctions, and public order frameworks. Climate activists, anti-racist movements, trade unions, migrant justice groups, and Palestine solidarity campaigns all expose the fragile boundary between democratic participation and criminalization. The Palestinian case thus offers not an exception but a lens through which to understand how repression can operate through legality itself.
Invited Speakers
Muna Haddad
Muna Haddad is a human rights lawyer specialising in international humanitarian law, human rights law, and Israeli constitutional and administrative law. She holds a PhD from the School of Law at Queen Mary University of London, where her research examined Israel’s use and abuse of the Palestinian dead and the limits of international law. She is a Research Fellow at Queen Mary University of London, researching attacks on healthcare in armed conflict.
Basil Farraj
Basil Farraj is the Director of the Ibrahim Abu Lughod Institute of International Studies and an assistant professor at the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Studies at Birzeit University. He holds a PhD in Anthropology and Sociology from the Geneva Graduate Institute, and is a receipt of the Arab Council for the Social Sciences Early Career Fellowship. His research addresses the intersections of memory, resistance, and art by prisoners and others at the receiving end of violence. Basil has conducted research in several countries, including Chile, Colombia, and Palestine.